Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
Of course this is a classic example of why one's politics should not be the defining characteristic by which we are judged. I disagree with his marxist views whilst recognising how and why they developed. But I don't find they in any way interfere with his scientific writings and was surprised to find out about his politics after many years of reading his works both for academic and pleasure purposes.
His work on punctuated equilibriums also looks to be absolutely spot on.
Agreed. I was fortunate to be studying Geology at Uni when this was still the big debate and I buy into the concept pretty much completely.
It's not wrong, it's just not interesting because how else did anyone ever think or say evolution works? It demolishes s complete straw man.theory of absolute uniformitarianism which nobody ever held.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
Of course this is a classic example of why one's politics should not be the defining characteristic by which we are judged. I disagree with his marxist views whilst recognising how and why they developed. But I don't find they in any way interfere with his scientific writings and was surprised to find out about his politics after many years of reading his works both for academic and pleasure purposes.
His work on punctuated equilibriums also looks to be absolutely spot on.
Agreed. I was fortunate to be studying Geology at Uni when this was still the big debate and I buy into the concept pretty much completely.
It's not wrong, it's just not interesting because how else did anyone ever think or say evolution works? It demolishes s complete straw man.theory of absolute uniformitarianism which nobody ever held.
Though it is relevant for all those "if evoloution happens, where are all your intermediate fossils then? Eh? EH?" conversations with creationists.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
"If the scientific method showed something to be true that the scientific method currently shows not to be true, would you be happy with the scientific method" is such a pointless argument, I do not see what possible value it could add to any discussion... Like, yes, if we lived in a reality where the sky was green, would I say the sky wasn't blue? Yes - but what is the value of that statement? Or are you then going to say "Lol, he would say the sky wasn't blue in this hypothetical reality I made up, despite the fact we live in a reality where the sky is blue - see how these people are just relativists?"
The "argument" you've just refuted is the soul of sophistry.
Abstracting away from the specifics of any particular situation, it's interesting to ask whether it is ever worthwhile for a credible scientist to "debate" someone who is obviously wrong and/or argues in bad faith.
But note the qualifier. ...kudos to scientists with enough self-awareness to recognize that they wouldn't be good in the very particular format of real-time public debate in front of a non-expert audience...
Rhetorical ability, and scientific chops are often not coincidental.
Peter Hitchens in his column yesterday claimed that it's almost impossible to get hold of the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. I'd be interested to know if that's actually the case.
Only one copy on Amazon, and that is of the BFI blu-ray for £30.
If it's BFI, I think you can go view it in one of their places. I keep meaning to do it myself.
Hitchens has struck on a sticky point: the disappearance of physical media makes it more and more difficult to access things except via online, which in turns requires greater and greater familiarisation with technology. Older people who don't understand apps and the various streaming options will be left behind.
Modest proposal: the British Library to take copies of every TV program and film and make them available in their site on production of a reading card and a free slot. May sound stupid, but these things are invaluable.
Fundamentally, though, Hitchens, @Leon and Greta Thunberg are in the same boat.
They are all actively seeking evidence that their point of view is correct. So Hitchens sees that Sunday Bloody Sunday is hard to get on DVD and yells "censorship!", when the reality is that DVDs are simply not getting made in anything like the quantity they were because an increasing proportion of the population don't own DVD players any more.
And @Leon sees an incredibly unusual occurrence (a small child at a highly sexualised drag show) and assumes that this is happening to more than a tiny, tiny fraction of kids. (And for those who do see such a thing, one has to reckon it's going to be with the consent of the parents. What with them having taken the kids to the show after all.)
For dear old Greta, it is seeing climate emergency in everything, even as the world continues to make the most extraordinary strides to a renewable future every single day.
Here's how you remain (relatively) impartial.
You ask yourself to think of a testable hypothesis that would disprove your assumption.
So, for Hitchens, you'd think of ten movies from the same period that you didn't have an attachment to, and see if they were also difficult to get hold of physically. And if they were, you might think that there was something more to it that censorship.
For @Leon, you could see if there's a poll of parents about whether their kids had seen a sexualised trans show. (I'm happy to pay for a YouGov survey if we really want to see how common it is that kids see such shows.)
For Greta, she could simply look at the extent to which clean energy is being installed on a truly momentous scale across the globe.
So we have proven that your initial claim that these dodgy drag shows are incredibly rare is in, fact, based on nothing but your supposition. Your priors. It's a guess. You don't know and have no evidence (either way). Tsk
It's a little early for you to be sozzled, isn't it?
My claim is that very, very few children will see a sexualised drag show of the one you shared the video from. And for those who did see it, the vast majority will have done so with the parents consent.
I'm happy to do a YouGov survey and to pay for it, if you like.
You know, gathering evidence rather than anecdote.
If you're actually willing to commission and pay for a US-wide YouGov to win some fairly piffling PB argument then I suggest it is you that has been on the vintage madeira. Bizarre
You might also find out, from your poll, that you are wrong. Just one aspect of this drag-shows-meet-kids thing is Drag Queen Story Hour
Wiki suggests these are far from "vanishingly rare"
"DSH events are COMMON in certain parts of the United States, but are rare in more conservative states where they are highly controversial.
DSH is banned in Tennessee, but was blocked by a Federal Judge.[52] Bans are being considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.[52]"
Debbonaire opens by quoting Churchill’s words in defence of our democratic institutions.
Then focuses on the impact of the covid lies on families of those who died.
It should not be about Covid or even parties. Boris is a big fibber and our democracy depends on telling the truth.
This gabbled and rambling speech from Debbonaire isn’t going to go down as one of history’s greats, for sure. Hopefully someone more able will set this debate alight soon.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
Yes. You can't reduce everything to a utilitarian balance of cost and benefit. Ukrainians are fighting against Russia largely for abstract ideas of freedom, independence and liberty, rather than for a utilitarian calculation of whether the cost of resistance will be outweighed by the future benefit of not living under Russian occupation.
I think that, even if it was demonstrated that there was a net utilitarian benefit to the death penalty, that I would still oppose it on the principle that I do not want the State to have the right to kill its citizens.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
While that's true, it would still be good to know if the death penalty saves lives and money.
My guess, looking at the US, is that it does neither, because keeping people on death row for so long is expensive; appeals are constant (and expensive); and there doesn't seem to be any obvious improvement in crime rates between states with and without the death penalty (because life in a US prison without parole is pretty shitty already).
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
While that's true, it would still be good to know if the death penalty saves lives and money.
My guess, looking at the US, is that it does neither, because keeping people on death row for so long is expensive; appeals are constant (and expensive); and there doesn't seem to be any obvious improvement in crime rates between states with and without the death penalty (because life in a US prison without parole is pretty shitty already).
The US is a bad example for that reason and it's why I inserted the word 'swift' into my original question.
Peter Hitchens in his column yesterday claimed that it's almost impossible to get hold of the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. I'd be interested to know if that's actually the case.
Only one copy on Amazon, and that is of the BFI blu-ray for £30.
If it's BFI, I think you can go view it in one of their places. I keep meaning to do it myself.
Hitchens has struck on a sticky point: the disappearance of physical media makes it more and more difficult to access things except via online, which in turns requires greater and greater familiarisation with technology. Older people who don't understand apps and the various streaming options will be left behind.
Modest proposal: the British Library to take copies of every TV program and film and make them available in their site on production of a reading card and a free slot. May sound stupid, but these things are invaluable.
Fundamentally, though, Hitchens, @Leon and Greta Thunberg are in the same boat.
They are all actively seeking evidence that their point of view is correct. So Hitchens sees that Sunday Bloody Sunday is hard to get on DVD and yells "censorship!", when the reality is that DVDs are simply not getting made in anything like the quantity they were because an increasing proportion of the population don't own DVD players any more.
And @Leon sees an incredibly unusual occurrence (a small child at a highly sexualised drag show) and assumes that this is happening to more than a tiny, tiny fraction of kids. (And for those who do see such a thing, one has to reckon it's going to be with the consent of the parents. What with them having taken the kids to the show after all.)
For dear old Greta, it is seeing climate emergency in everything, even as the world continues to make the most extraordinary strides to a renewable future every single day.
Here's how you remain (relatively) impartial.
You ask yourself to think of a testable hypothesis that would disprove your assumption.
So, for Hitchens, you'd think of ten movies from the same period that you didn't have an attachment to, and see if they were also difficult to get hold of physically. And if they were, you might think that there was something more to it that censorship.
For @Leon, you could see if there's a poll of parents about whether their kids had seen a sexualised trans show. (I'm happy to pay for a YouGov survey if we really want to see how common it is that kids see such shows.)
For Greta, she could simply look at the extent to which clean energy is being installed on a truly momentous scale across the globe.
So we have proven that your initial claim that these dodgy drag shows are incredibly rare is in, fact, based on nothing but your supposition. Your priors. It's a guess. You don't know and have no evidence (either way). Tsk
Don't gainsay the Primrose Hill Polymath. What Three Words he'll use to shoot you down is up to him. The only certainty is that he'll leave your argument in Threads. He'll always Surprise on the Upside.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
While that's true, there may be several orders of magnitude between the two.
It's like this. I oppose the use of torture by our government. But if there was a nuclear bomb that was going to go off and kill a million people if we didn't torture a terrorist to get the disarm code, then obviously I'd support the use of torture.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
In most countries, vaccination is not compulsory, in which case the questions have very little in common.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
All too often, science relies on nuance. The public are really bad with nuances.
Science also often relies on probabilities / risks; again, the public are really poor at evaluating probabilities and risks (though I'd expect PB to be far better than average on the former).
lly: you cannot debate with an intelligent malign actor. And Rogan et al are malign actors. They're not interested in the public good; they're interested in their own filthy lucre.
Do you ever watch Rogan? He really is not a malign actor. He is massively popular because he clearly has an open mind, and because he is rich and popular enough to ignore the Woke attempts to silence him (I see people on here want him silenced even now)
He is great on a number of subjects, from fame to music to aliens to football to economics to Trumpism (he is anti-Trump, btw) - and he's great because he gets real experts or eye witnesses in, and he makes them relax, and he lets them talk freely in a way no one else quite does, til in the end they are spilling stuff they would do on no other show
Hi present position on the UFO flap is that it is elaborate USG psy-ops. What makes that important is that he has interviewed ALL the major characters in that story and he's reached this conclusion
Check him out. At he's best he is compelling. I find the Ultimate Fighting stuff less compelling, to be fair
I've seen a few, and yes, he's malign. And I am *totally* unsurprised that you enjoy his output, as you're exactly his target market.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
In most countries, vaccination is not compulsory, in which case the questions have very little in common.
Most countries had a policy of making non-compliance extremely inconvenient.
Peter Hitchens in his column yesterday claimed that it's almost impossible to get hold of the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. I'd be interested to know if that's actually the case.
Only one copy on Amazon, and that is of the BFI blu-ray for £30.
If it's BFI, I think you can go view it in one of their places. I keep meaning to do it myself.
Hitchens has struck on a sticky point: the disappearance of physical media makes it more and more difficult to access things except via online, which in turns requires greater and greater familiarisation with technology. Older people who don't understand apps and the various streaming options will be left behind.
Modest proposal: the British Library to take copies of every TV program and film and make them available in their site on production of a reading card and a free slot. May sound stupid, but these things are invaluable.
Fundamentally, though, Hitchens, @Leon and Greta Thunberg are in the same boat.
They are all actively seeking evidence that their point of view is correct. So Hitchens sees that Sunday Bloody Sunday is hard to get on DVD and yells "censorship!", when the reality is that DVDs are simply not getting made in anything like the quantity they were because an increasing proportion of the population don't own DVD players any more.
And @Leon sees an incredibly unusual occurrence (a small child at a highly sexualised drag show) and assumes that this is happening to more than a tiny, tiny fraction of kids. (And for those who do see such a thing, one has to reckon it's going to be with the consent of the parents. What with them having taken the kids to the show after all.)
For dear old Greta, it is seeing climate emergency in everything, even as the world continues to make the most extraordinary strides to a renewable future every single day.
Here's how you remain (relatively) impartial.
You ask yourself to think of a testable hypothesis that would disprove your assumption.
So, for Hitchens, you'd think of ten movies from the same period that you didn't have an attachment to, and see if they were also difficult to get hold of physically. And if they were, you might think that there was something more to it that censorship.
For @Leon, you could see if there's a poll of parents about whether their kids had seen a sexualised trans show. (I'm happy to pay for a YouGov survey if we really want to see how common it is that kids see such shows.)
For Greta, she could simply look at the extent to which clean energy is being installed on a truly momentous scale across the globe.
So we have proven that your initial claim that these dodgy drag shows are incredibly rare is in, fact, based on nothing but your supposition. Your priors. It's a guess. You don't know and have no evidence (either way). Tsk
It's a little early for you to be sozzled, isn't it?
My claim is that very, very few children will see a sexualised drag show of the one you shared the video from. And for those who did see it, the vast majority will have done so with the parents consent.
I'm happy to do a YouGov survey and to pay for it, if you like.
You know, gathering evidence rather than anecdote.
If you're actually willing to commission and pay for a US-wide YouGov to win some fairly piffling PB argument then I suggest it is you that has been on the vintage madeira. Bizarre
You might also find out, from your poll, that you are wrong. Just one aspect of this drag-shows-meet-kids thing is Drag Queen Story Hour
Wiki suggests these are far from "vanishingly rare"
"DSH events are COMMON in certain parts of the United States, but are rare in more conservative states where they are highly controversial.
DSH is banned in Tennessee, but was blocked by a Federal Judge.[52] Bans are being considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.[52]"
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
In most countries, vaccination is not compulsory, in which case the questions have very little in common.
Most countries had a policy of making non-compliance extremely inconvenient.
Probably not as inconvenient as being executed for a crime you didn't commit.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
Of course this is a classic example of why one's politics should not be the defining characteristic by which we are judged. I disagree with his marxist views whilst recognising how and why they developed. But I don't find they in any way interfere with his scientific writings and was surprised to find out about his politics after many years of reading his works both for academic and pleasure purposes.
His work on punctuated equilibriums also looks to be absolutely spot on.
Agreed. I was fortunate to be studying Geology at Uni when this was still the big debate and I buy into the concept pretty much completely.
It's not wrong, it's just not interesting because how else did anyone ever think or say evolution works? It demolishes s complete straw man.theory of absolute uniformitarianism which nobody ever held.
Wrong. Utterly wrong. The slow steady progress idea with gradual genetic change resulting in speciation was THE idea underpinning evolution for decades. Indeed at the time I was at university that argument was mainstream. The idea it was a straw man argument is simply wrong from start to finish. Eldridge and Gould changed the whole way evolution was considered and understood.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
They do, but the evidence supporting the deterrent effect of capital punishment is thin.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
The GOAT of wrong but brilliant pop science books must surely be The Kon-Tiki Expedition.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
LOL. Archaeology and Language is another of my favourites from University. And again, it was not as wrong as people claim. WHat we have learned since the 1970s has certainly opened up the debate but it has by no means disproved Renfrew's central hypothesis - if only because, to be honest, there is no way anyone could disprove it. Which of course undermines its scientific chops to some extent.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
One of the issues with scientists debating with non-scientists was illustrated on PB yesterday with your good self. Scientists talk a different language to non-scientists. Scientists tend to be more reserved and cagey about things, less definite, less certain. Non-scientists are prone to be more certain about things.
How do I discuss what I do with a non-scientist? I have to use a lay-person approach. You discuss the work in language an intelligent but non-expert person would be able to follow. And that is not the same as a discussion among scientists.
Its impossible (or nearly so) to debate anti-vaxxers. Does vaccination carry risks? Yes, clearly and demonstrably so. People did die after covid vaccination and probably directly from it. So an anti-vaxxer might conclude that you should not take the vaccine. Yet vaccination suffers from the lockdown problem. After the event people have started to say that it didn't work, or wasn't necessary. And that, demonstrably, is not true. We have enough population data to show this now. We also have the huge shift in health burden associated with a fully open country after vaccination with what went before.
But how do you have that conversation with people who will not understand statistics and how the data works?
But we had the same debate about lab leak
There you were, all the pompous scientists, calmly and condescendingly saying "but all these pandemics spring from zoonosis, they come from nature, this is how it happens, go back in history, you don't understand the maths of how it jumps from stoats to seagulls to Sandra Yang in the wet market"
Then there's me saying, "Yeah, whatever, the only city that this engineered-to-be-dangerous new bat coronavirus emerged in the world is the same city where they have the only lab in the world engineering new bat coronaviruses, it came from the lab. It's bleedin' obvious"
And, weirdly, I - the layman - turned out to be right, perhaps because I am able to take a wider view than a mere scientist with a specialism
Antivaxxery needs to be addressed and debated. Debate them
And in this case, I'd be cheering on the scientists, people like you, as I am sure they are right in the main. Running away from debate only makes it worse and calling antivaxxery a "baseless conspiracy theory" is pointless too, as that's EXACTLY the words used about lab leak in the Lancet Letter
It's gone from 'lol' to 'hmm maybe' but it's far from proven. And anybody pushing it from the start (merely because of the coincidence of Wuhan having a lab) wouldn't be vindicated if it turns out correct because they'll have been right for the wrong reasons.
Similar to doing a £100 bet on tails for a coin toss and taking odds of 1/2 when it should be evens. That's a bad bet. Even if it comes up tails and you win the £50 it was a bad bet.
It would be the first epidemic to be caused by a lab leak, which would be interesting and is definitely possible. The fact no-one knows also makes it interesting. A bit like the Loch Ness monster. It loses all interest if anyone actually finds the thing or proves it definitely doesn't exist.
Nevertheless the only thing which matters is China needs to get a lot more serious about food safety. Within a couple of decades they had one SARS epidemic killing millions that was certainly caused by contaminated food and now a second one that probably was. If they don't sort this out - and the rest of us should be banging on about it - we're simply waiting for the next time round. I for one am not happy about it.
China should also tighten up on its lab practices, some of which are unacceptably dangerous.
And by the way, because I don't think anyone has mentioned it. That report from the Sunday Times last week was utter garbage. As someone whose job title includes the word analyst I would likely be fired if I produced something that has so little connection with the known facts , and was demonstrably wrong in several places.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Likely ends her leadership prospects, she won't win the members vote for likely next Tory Leader and Leader of the Opposition for supporting the report condemning Boris, however she is giving a dignified performance
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
While that's true, there may be several orders of magnitude between the two.
It's like this. I oppose the use of torture by our government. But if there was a nuclear bomb that was going to go off and kill a million people if we didn't torture a terrorist to get the disarm code, then obviously I'd support the use of torture.
There's always an ad absurdam for moral arguments, of course.
But the one you mention was, also of course, repeatedly wheeled out as justification for torture which was utterly unjustified.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
They do, but the evidence supporting the deterrent effect of capital punishment is thin.
Is it a coincidence that Singapore has such low levels of drug abuse?
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
This is a different point to mine. I'm talking about 'debating' morons and grifters, ie listening attentively to them and addressing their 'arguments'. I see very little value in that. I'd rather point and laugh or insult or (the optimum) ignore. Debating legitimises drivel if the purveyor of the drivel is sufficiently devious and has a pull on the audience. So it's counterproductive. Also you can't spend time giving drivel purveyors a chance to show they have a point. Best to go with your initial snap judgment. Occasionally they will have a point, in which case you'll have missed out on something and be the poorer for it, but life's too short for any other approach imo.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Likely ends her leadership prospects, she won't win the members vote for likely next Tory Leader and Leader of the Opposition for supporting the report condemning Boris, however she is giving a dignified performance
Of course it should strengthen her leadership credentials. But of course sadly you are right, it won't.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
That really is pathetic. What a bunch of useless, spineless toerags they are. Penny Mordaunt continues to grow in my estimation though (remembers her Coronation performance and goes for a cold shower).
Peter Hitchens in his column yesterday claimed that it's almost impossible to get hold of the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. I'd be interested to know if that's actually the case.
Only one copy on Amazon, and that is of the BFI blu-ray for £30.
If it's BFI, I think you can go view it in one of their places. I keep meaning to do it myself.
Hitchens has struck on a sticky point: the disappearance of physical media makes it more and more difficult to access things except via online, which in turns requires greater and greater familiarisation with technology. Older people who don't understand apps and the various streaming options will be left behind.
Modest proposal: the British Library to take copies of every TV program and film and make them available in their site on production of a reading card and a free slot. May sound stupid, but these things are invaluable.
Fundamentally, though, Hitchens, @Leon and Greta Thunberg are in the same boat.
They are all actively seeking evidence that their point of view is correct. So Hitchens sees that Sunday Bloody Sunday is hard to get on DVD and yells "censorship!", when the reality is that DVDs are simply not getting made in anything like the quantity they were because an increasing proportion of the population don't own DVD players any more.
And @Leon sees an incredibly unusual occurrence (a small child at a highly sexualised drag show) and assumes that this is happening to more than a tiny, tiny fraction of kids. (And for those who do see such a thing, one has to reckon it's going to be with the consent of the parents. What with them having taken the kids to the show after all.)
For dear old Greta, it is seeing climate emergency in everything, even as the world continues to make the most extraordinary strides to a renewable future every single day.
Here's how you remain (relatively) impartial.
You ask yourself to think of a testable hypothesis that would disprove your assumption.
So, for Hitchens, you'd think of ten movies from the same period that you didn't have an attachment to, and see if they were also difficult to get hold of physically. And if they were, you might think that there was something more to it that censorship.
For @Leon, you could see if there's a poll of parents about whether their kids had seen a sexualised trans show. (I'm happy to pay for a YouGov survey if we really want to see how common it is that kids see such shows.)
For Greta, she could simply look at the extent to which clean energy is being installed on a truly momentous scale across the globe.
So we have proven that your initial claim that these dodgy drag shows are incredibly rare is in, fact, based on nothing but your supposition. Your priors. It's a guess. You don't know and have no evidence (either way). Tsk
It's a little early for you to be sozzled, isn't it?
My claim is that very, very few children will see a sexualised drag show of the one you shared the video from. And for those who did see it, the vast majority will have done so with the parents consent.
I'm happy to do a YouGov survey and to pay for it, if you like.
You know, gathering evidence rather than anecdote.
If you're actually willing to commission and pay for a US-wide YouGov to win some fairly piffling PB argument then I suggest it is you that has been on the vintage madeira. Bizarre
You might also find out, from your poll, that you are wrong. Just one aspect of this drag-shows-meet-kids thing is Drag Queen Story Hour
Wiki suggests these are far from "vanishingly rare"
"DSH events are COMMON in certain parts of the United States, but are rare in more conservative states where they are highly controversial.
DSH is banned in Tennessee, but was blocked by a Federal Judge.[52] Bans are being considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.[52]"
And remember, DSH is one aspect of a larger phenomenon
YouGov polls for this kind of thing are cheap. Like hundred of dollars. It'd be the 18th or 19th question for 800 people, just after the ones about fabric conditioner.
But more importantly, you're falling foul of equating a pantomime dame reading a children's story (which I suspect will still be pretty rare), with a hypersexualised drag show and a six year old.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
The GOAT of wrong but brilliant pop science books must surely be The Kon-Tiki Expedition.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Likely ends her leadership prospects, she won't win the members vote for likely next Tory Leader and Leader of the Opposition for supporting the report condemning Boris, however she is giving a dignified performance
Of course it should strengthen her leadership credentials. But of course sadly you are right, it won't.
Sunak and the rest should be ashamed.
Indeed. So far, Bob Seely and Peter Bottomley have spoken briefly from the Tory side to support the motion.
Not much powerful oratory on display so far. The days when big-hitting parliamentarians could lift a debate onto a higher plane and map out a big picture put into its historical context, with some phrases that might stick in the memory, or even some appropriate humour, appear to be fading away.
Even this Australian female MP from the SNP doesn’t have the knack of her original countryfolk.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
In most countries, vaccination is not compulsory, in which case the questions have very little in common.
Most countries had a policy of making non-compliance extremely inconvenient.
Probably not as inconvenient as being executed for a crime you didn't commit.
The equivalence there is with people who died as a result of an adverse event from the vaccine.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
Likely ends her leadership prospects, she won't win the members vote for likely next Tory Leader and Leader of the Opposition for supporting the report condemning Boris, however she is giving a dignified performance
Of course it should strengthen her leadership credentials. But of course sadly you are right, it won't.
Sunak and the rest should be ashamed.
Indeed. So far, Bob Seely and Peter Bottomley have spoken briefly from the Tory side to support the motion.
Not much powerful oratory on display so far. The days when big-hitting parliamentarians could lift a debate onto a higher plane and map out a big picture put into its historical context, with some phrases that might stick in the memory, or even some appropriate humour, appear to be fading away.
Even this Australian female MP from the SNP doesn’t have the knack of her original countryfolk.
On the Tory benches the "big-hitting parliamentarians" were all culled by Bozo because they didn't fully buy into his hard Brexit bullshit.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
The GOAT of wrong but brilliant pop science books must surely be The Kon-Tiki Expedition.
In an ideal world then Sunak and all ministers would be lined up in the commons giving Boris a shoeing however could it be a calculation that this debate and vote will largely be forgotten by the general population by the time of the next election (although the partying won’t but is now baked in) but any Tory civil war that dragged on between pro Johnsons and antis would do even more damage.
By staying away and leaving this as a fait accompli I guess Sunak and co hope that it draws a bit of a line with regards infighting and so have chosen the political over the moral.
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
Of course this is a classic example of why one's politics should not be the defining characteristic by which we are judged. I disagree with his marxist views whilst recognising how and why they developed. But I don't find they in any way interfere with his scientific writings and was surprised to find out about his politics after many years of reading his works both for academic and pleasure purposes.
His work on punctuated equilibriums also looks to be absolutely spot on.
Agreed. I was fortunate to be studying Geology at Uni when this was still the big debate and I buy into the concept pretty much completely.
It's not wrong, it's just not interesting because how else did anyone ever think or say evolution works? It demolishes s complete straw man.theory of absolute uniformitarianism which nobody ever held.
Wrong. Utterly wrong. The slow steady progress idea with gradual genetic change resulting in speciation was THE idea underpinning evolution for decades. Indeed at the time I was at university that argument was mainstream. The idea it was a straw man argument is simply wrong from start to finish. Eldridge and Gould changed the whole way evolution was considered and understood.
Molecular genetics has shown the whole genotype - phenotype model to be way more complicated than either side in the debate envisaged, anyway.
This is a nice account of work on octopuses over the last decade.
Octopuses use RNA editing to rapidly respond to temperature changes by altering protein function https://phys.org/news/2023-06-octopuses-rna-rapidly-temperature-protein.html ...In a study appearing in Cell on June 8, Rosenthal and colleagues document an enormous uptick in RNA editing when octopus, squid and cuttlefish, known as coleoid cephalopods, acclimate to cold water. After cooling the octopuses' tanks, the team saw increases in protein-altering activity at more than 13,000 RNA sites in the animals' nervous systems. In two of these cases, they investigated how swapping out a single letter of the RNA molecule's code alters the function of proteins the neurons produce.
Through RNA editing, the cephalopods appear to have found a unique way of tweaking their own physiology, according to Rosenthal, a senior scientist at MBL.
"We're used to thinking all living things are preprogrammed from birth with a certain set of instructions," he says. "The idea the environment can influence that genetic information, as we've shown in cephalopods, is a new concept."
A cell's molecular machinery transcribes the instructions encoded in DNA into RNA, some of which goes on to make protein. Researchers have learned that cells have the capacity to swap one member of the four-letter genetic code, adenosine, for a substitute molecule, inosine, which behaves like guanosine, one of the original four. While the same process occurs in humans and most other animals, it only rarely affects RNA that's bound to produce protein.
In 2015, Rosenthal and his colleagues showed that squid employ this kind of protein-altering RNA editing (called A-to-I) on a massive scale, and later showed the same in octopus.
"A big question for us was, 'What are they using it for?'" Rosenthal says...
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
While that's true, there may be several orders of magnitude between the two.
It's like this. I oppose the use of torture by our government. But if there was a nuclear bomb that was going to go off and kill a million people if we didn't torture a terrorist to get the disarm code, then obviously I'd support the use of torture.
There's always an ad absurdam for moral arguments, of course.
But the one you mention was, also of course, repeatedly wheeled out as justification for torture which was utterly unjustified.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
That really is pathetic. What a bunch of useless, spineless toerags they are. Penny Mordaunt continues to grow in my estimation though (remembers her Coronation performance and goes for a cold shower).
Penny Mordaunt won't be diminished by this IMO (I hope). Johnson is a busted flush. Only the most swiveleyed ex-Brexit Party infiltrators will want him back. After the next election the Tories will need the person best suited to calling Mr. Boring SKS to account. Mordaunt is the only one who will be able to do it. And she will make him look even more dull than he seems already. It is why many of the Labour tribalists on here are so desperate to diminish her.
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
They do, but the evidence supporting the deterrent effect of capital punishment is thin.
Is it a coincidence that Singapore has such low levels of drug abuse?
I said thin, not non existent. But Singapore is an extremely poor proxy for most of the rest of the world's societies, as I'm sure you're aware.
@paulwaugh now @HarrietHarman just revealed to @Jacob_Rees_Mogg she had offered to step aside if Govt felt she was biased against Johnson. Govt refused her offer.
"That's a mic drop, Rees-Mogg!" one Labour MP shouts
Rees-Mogg looks like a twat. Always, but especially today.
@RobDotHutton 12s Minor bombshell moment as "Sir" Jacob Rees-Mogg asks Harriet Harman why she didn't quit over perceived bias revealed in Tweets. She reveals she consulted the govt and offered to resign if they didn't have confidence. The govt, she says, told her to carry on.
There's a wonderful bit in Lomberg's The Skeptical Environmentalist where he compares polling for:
(a) Has the pollution and the general environment worsened or improved in your local area and (b) What is your perceptiomn about the direction of the enviornment worldwide
Most people - almost irrespective of where they lived - felt that their local environment had improved. Those same people also all felt that globally things are getting worse.
You see a similar thing with crime. If you look at trends in "have you personally been the victim of crime" and "do you think crime rates are getting better or worse", you see the two are completely uncorrelated. Crime rates can be worsening, with no perception that they're getting worse.
The same is true for many epidemics (dog bites man!), etc. We think frequency in the real world is highly correlated with headlines, when it is not.
@hoffman_noa From one Tory MP today on whether the party can finally move on after the Boris vote this eve: "No. There's too much trauma. And he'll still burn us to the ground if he thinks he needs to. He has more planned - it isn't over in his mind."
@paulwaugh now @HarrietHarman just revealed to @Jacob_Rees_Mogg she had offered to step aside if Govt felt she was biased against Johnson. Govt refused her offer.
"That's a mic drop, Rees-Mogg!" one Labour MP shouts
RFK Jr on the Pfizer Vaccine: "22,000 people got the Vaccine and 22,000 didn't. During that six month period, 1 Vaccinated person died of Covid and in the placebo group 2 people died. That allows Pfizer and the FDA to say the Vaccine is 100% effective."
RFK junior sounsd indististinguishable from Trump.
He's really unconvincing
However I think the refusal by scientists to debate RFK's antivaxxery on Joe Rogan is a major mistake. They are haughtily doing it on the basis that debating him would give credence to a "conspiracy theory"
But for a year these same pompous, self-important scientists told us "lab leak" was a baseless conspiracy, and forbade debates on it
People no longer kneel, automatically, before The Science. If antivaxxery is foolish nonsense (and it probably is, but we don;t know for sure, and this is a live issue) then debate it, Prove your case. Make RFK look like a jerk. Don't avoid debate on the basis scientists shouldn't have to bother with these "nutters". The scientists were the nutters who told us lab leak was impossible
1) scientists are not typically good at communicating science - the few who do are also looked down on by the scientific community because they aren't producing research (the thing that shows you're a good scientist) and are likely instead making TV shows 2) when do we tell people to shut up and stop being stupid? At some point we have to - evolution, germ theory, flat earthers: when do we stop? The argument about vaccines is about saving lives, and it is good to have better vaccine education in general, but to dignify actual antivaxxers with a debate or response is nonsense 3) why is Joe Rogan being paid stupid money by spotify to spread this kind of dangerous misinformation. It is hardly curtailing free speech to not pay someone millions of dollars for doing something - I think it is more than reasonable to have had a part of the contract that says doing that kind of nonsense will lead to losing money or even cancellation of the show 4) "A lie will go around the world before the truth has put it's shoes on". It is easy to lie. It is easy to say "Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine". It is easy to say "Scientists have never found a transitionary species in the fossil record". You know what takes a long time? Explaining how vaccines work, how we know they work, and what they do; how we have found transition fossils, how many of them we have found, and what that suggests about evolution. It is always easier to make a baseless claim, or multiple baseless claims, and when the person arguing in good faith spends all their time debunking one baseless claim you shout "ah ha, see how he ignored all the other baseless claims I made!" (it's called a Gish Gallop after the famous creationist Dr Gish who used to do that - he also had an appearance in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, for those of you who may have seen that)
All in all, taking bad faith arguments as if they are good faith and trying to dissect them whilst giving them a larger audience to be spread does not work. Better would be governments coming down hard on social media moderation and refusing to accept the argument that stuff is moderated by ai or algorithms and say "if you can't moderate content without actual humans viewing the content, either hire humans or close down because your platform is actively harmful)
I'm not sure the BIB is true. Many excellent scientists are also excellent at talking about it. There is a significant trend in science now to show public engagement - how will you engage (in both directions) with the public? This is both listening to the public as well as disseminating information.
There is sometimes a bit of jealousy about scientists who have become the rock stars of science (Brian Cox, Alice Roberts etc). Sometimes they have achieved the status of Professor for non academic merit, but because of the public role. But generally people accept it.
We've also seen a lot more engagement on SM, such as Twitter through the pandemic, some good, some bad. Its notable how many of my colleagues are on twitter and promoting their work via that platform.
Two that immediately spring to mind are Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould. Both at the very forefront of their disciplines (Quantum Mechanics and Evolutionary theory) yet both great communicators, popularisers and educators. Being a great media figure does not in any way mean one is not also a great scientist.
I have all Gould's books but its been some years since I dipped in. One essay always sticks in my mind - a tale of false memory where he describes sitting somewhere with a relative that he remembers from childhood and then comes to realise that his memory cannot be correct. And yet the memory persists.
I had a conversation with my folks yesterday where they told me that schoolfriends used to ring me up for homework advice on a regular basis. I cannot recall this at all. Nothing, Not one occasion, but I have no reason to doubt them. What else have I forgotten?
Stephen Jay Gould was essentially a Marxist. Not really the cuddly professorial character he is often portrayed as
Good writer, tho. Crisp and lucid prose
"If only Gould could think as clearly as he writes" - Richard Dawkins. Wonderful Life was about as wrong as it is possible to be. And his punctuated equilibrium and spandrels stuff was just wrong too. He decided he would be Einstein to Darwin's Newton.
I also mentioned "Wonderful Life". "Wonderful Life" gets a lot wrong, as we've learnt from more recent research based on the great Chinese fossil discoveries, but I think "about as wrong as it is possible to be" is an exaggeration. It remains a good history of the Burgess Shale work and it's argument about the importance of contingency has some merit, if precisely how much is debated.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
Yes, May just confirmed she will vote in favour of the report condemning Boris.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
I am not really following the debate but you and your fellow members show all that is wrong with the conservative party today and if you and its members prevail in the party it will not see power again
We are very different conservatives and I am truly disappointed that Sunak looks like ducking the vote which is just wrong
It takes three outstanding women, Penny Mordaunt, Theresa May, and Harriet Harman to stand up in parliament for honesty, integrity and decency and you and the others trying to excuse Johnson should be ashamed and be marginalised
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
The question of whether the risk of a miscarriage of justice outweighs the risk of a murder deterred is a moral judgement, and so not one on which an expert's opinion is any more valuable than a layman's.
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
It's also 100% certain that a mass vaccination campaign will result in the deaths of unsuspecting innocent people so the two questions have more in common than you might think.
They do, but the evidence supporting the deterrent effect of capital punishment is thin.
Is it a coincidence that Singapore has such low levels of drug abuse?
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
Yes, May just confirmed she will vote in favour of the report condemning Boris.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
I am not really following the debate but you and your fellow members show all that is wrong with the conservative party today and if you and its members prevail in the party it will not see power again
We are very different conservatives and I am truly disappointed that Sunak looks like ducking the vote which is just wrong
It takes three outstanding women, Penny Mordaunt, Theresa May, and Harriet Harman to stand up in parliament for honesty, integrity and decency and you and the others trying to excuse Johnson should be ashamed and be marginalised
Apologists for Johnson such as HYUFD are as braindead and immoral as the loons who support Trump. HY's view is that it is OK to support someone who has zero morals because he might be a liar but he is "our" liar. It is this type of stupidity that leads to and encourages dictatorship.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
That really is pathetic. What a bunch of useless, spineless toerags they are. Penny Mordaunt continues to grow in my estimation though (remembers her Coronation performance and goes for a cold shower).
Penny Mordaunt won't be diminished by this IMO (I hope). Johnson is a busted flush. Only the most swiveleyed ex-Brexit Party infiltrators will want him back. After the next election the Tories will need the person best suited to calling Mr. Boring SKS to account. Mordaunt is the only one who will be able to do it. And she will make him look even more dull than he seems already. It is why many of the Labour tribalists on here are so desperate to diminish her.
The Tories may well need that. Current evidence suggests they'll surprise us with someone even more unsuitable than any this Century.
There's a wonderful bit in Lomberg's The Skeptical Environmentalist where he compares polling for:
(a) Has the pollution and the general environment worsened or improved in your local area and (b) What is your perceptiomn about the direction of the enviornment worldwide
Most people - almost irrespective of where they lived - felt that their local environment had improved. Those same people also all felt that globally things are getting worse.
You see a similar thing with crime. If you look at trends in "have you personally been the victim of crime" and "do you think crime rates are getting better or worse", you see the two are completely uncorrelated. Crime rates can be worsening, with no perception that they're getting worse.
The same is true for many epidemics (dog bites man!), etc. We think frequency in the real world is highly correlated with headlines, when it is not.
Also often true of perceptions of economic well-being.
But Lomborg was being disingenuous (of course). His whole schtick is that we should focus on local environment rather than trying to stop global warming. The very thing that makes climate change such a dangerous problem is the fact it creeps up on us all, manifesting in multiple often hard to attribute natural disasters that are not evenly spaced around the map.
I'm beginning to wonder if some of these right wing populists aren't very nice people at all.
The whole “Pride Month” in the US, has blown up in quite spectacular fashion, with a number of riots, and large corporates trying to distance themselves from the extremists on both sides.
It’s turned from a celebration of gay rights into a movement that, to its opponents, appears to be aimed specifically at children, prompting a backlash from more socially conservative parents.
Because the Republican Party, unable to offer any solutions to America’s problems, has deliberately ramped up culture wars and lies about Pride Month.
It wasn’t the Republican Party who proposed the legislation in California, that proposes to remove children from their parents, into the care of the State, if the parents disagree with the gender transition process of pre-pubescent children.
It wasn’t the Republican Party who decided that sex shows in front of primary school children were now somehow okay, so long as the performers were in drag.
@KevinASchofield now Andrea Leadsom becomes the latest senior Tory to mount a strong defence of the privileges committee and say she will vote for its report tonight.
The longer this debate goes on, the worse Rishi Sunak's decision to dodge the vote looks ...
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
Yes, May just confirmed she will vote in favour of the report condemning Boris.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
And so she should. Amuses me that Johnson expected loyalty to him but has never shown loyalty to anyone else, including his own family
Loyalty to people is a mugs' game. You're just giving them license to use you as a doormat. If you ever face a choice between abandoning a well-thought-out principle at the request of a person, treat the person as though they've been grooming you. Otherwise you'll be left clearing up the mess they caused you to make, looking like a twat because you knew better but did the wrong thing anyway.
I assume that is humour masquerading as cynicism? Or maybe just both? Blind loyalty of the my country/party right or wrong variety (witness HYUFD and swivel-eyed Trump supporters) is extremely dangerous. A world without loyalty at all would be a dysfunctional and dangerous mirror image of HY's stupidity
Elon Musk now telling Peter Hotez to debate RFK jr on vaccines.
First of all, I am generally pro vaccine. I have been vaccinated against pretty much everything, as have my kids. Second, I think there is tremendous promise in synthetic mRNA. It is like medicine going from analog to digital. That said, the world obviously went crazy with excess vaccination against “Covid-19”. I have that in quotes, because the RNA sequences changed so much that I called it the virus of Theseus. So many people I know had serious side effects from the vaccines, including myself. Failure to acknowledge that is a lie. As for the deaths you claim are due to Covid-19, why is the nation of Sweden still alive!? Just go on Rogan and do the debate.
Joining me today to debate the efficacy of Covid vaccines is one of the world's foremost experts in epidemiology - hello Professor - and to put the other side of the argument we have a vibrant right wing internet personality Hugo Revolving-Bow-Tie. We'll start with you, Hugo ...
If the world's foremost experts in criminology concluded that the swift use of the death penalty reduced the level of violent crime, decreased the risk of being murdered, and that this vastly outweighed the small risk of miscarriages of justice, would you defer to their view?
I absolutely would. If the cost-benefit of the death penalty was clearly and unambiguously positive, then I'd say "sure I want safeguards, but let's do it."
I absolutely would not.
Some things are not worth determining by cost-benefit ratios, and the principle that the state should not kill people who are in custody is one I would not waver on even if there were benefits from letting the state do so.
Eagle says members of the privileges committee have had to be provided with extra security
A decent, reasonably powerful speech, criticising Johnson for his behaviour both before and since. Up there with Theresa May for person of the match, so far.
@KevinASchofield now Andrea Leadsom becomes the latest senior Tory to mount a strong defence of the privileges committee and say she will vote for its report tonight.
The longer this debate goes on, the worse Rishi Sunak's decision to dodge the vote looks ...
I agree. It makes him look weak. People will contrast how Starmer faced down the Corbynistas
@KevinASchofield now Andrea Leadsom becomes the latest senior Tory to mount a strong defence of the privileges committee and say she will vote for its report tonight.
The longer this debate goes on, the worse Rishi Sunak's decision to dodge the vote looks ...
I agree. It makes him look weak. People will contrast how Starmer faced down the Corbynistas
What, by campaigning to put him in Downing Street? At least Sunak (eventually) resigned.
As I said earlier, tonight really is a test of Tory fitness to govern. Sunak has flunked it. Any Tory who fails to vote in favour will be reminded of it come election time.
It takes courage to defy the moral cowardice and blindness of colleagues. Penny Mordaunt deserves a lot credit.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
That really is pathetic. What a bunch of useless, spineless toerags they are. Penny Mordaunt continues to grow in my estimation though (remembers her Coronation performance and goes for a cold shower).
Penny Mordaunt won't be diminished by this IMO (I hope). Johnson is a busted flush. Only the most swiveleyed ex-Brexit Party infiltrators will want him back. After the next election the Tories will need the person best suited to calling Mr. Boring SKS to account. Mordaunt is the only one who will be able to do it. And she will make him look even more dull than he seems already. It is why many of the Labour tribalists on here are so desperate to diminish her.
The Tories may well need that. Current evidence suggests they'll surprise us with someone even more unsuitable than any this Century.
It is my fear. They might well do a reflection of the Labour Party when they elected Corbyn. "Let us have Rees-Mogg on the ballot so the members can choose from all wings of the Party" Arghhhhhh!
@KevinASchofield now Andrea Leadsom becomes the latest senior Tory to mount a strong defence of the privileges committee and say she will vote for its report tonight.
The longer this debate goes on, the worse Rishi Sunak's decision to dodge the vote looks ...
I agree. It makes him look weak. People will contrast how Starmer faced down the Corbynistas
Partly, that's because Sunak is weak.
Also, he's more than a bit complicit. He was in Downing Street all the time. It's the old Watergate questions- what did he know (my guess, more than he has let on) and when did he know it (ages ago).
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
Yes, May just confirmed she will vote in favour of the report condemning Boris.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
And so she should. Amuses me that Johnson expected loyalty to him but has never shown loyalty to anyone else, including his own family
Loyalty to people is a mugs' game. You're just giving them license to use you as a doormat. If you ever face a choice between abandoning a well-thought-out principle at the request of a person, treat the person as though they've been grooming you. Otherwise you'll be left clearing up the mess they caused you to make, looking like a twat because you knew better but did the wrong thing anyway.
I assume that is humour masquerading as cynicism? Or maybe just both? Blind loyalty of the my country/party right or wrong variety (witness HYUFD and swivel-eyed Trump supporters) is extremely dangerous. A world without loyalty at all would be a dysfunctional and dangerous mirror image of HY's stupidity
No, that was entirely in earnest. You should not be loyal to people (or countries or institutions or anything) if they require you to fold on your principles.
If my wife murdered someone, I'd turn her in. If my country asked me to commit war crimes, I'd defect. If my company asked me to look the other way while they circumvented AML laws I'd take the receipts to the police.
Principles first. Don't ignore your moral compass if it's telling you your loyalty is about to lead you astray.
Ah, you have now qualified it. Your previous post seemed to infer that any loyalty was bogus. I cannot disagree with what you have written on this one.
PS when I next see your wife I will advise her to not share too many secrets with you.
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
Yes, May just confirmed she will vote in favour of the report condemning Boris.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
And so she should. Amuses me that Johnson expected loyalty to him but has never shown loyalty to anyone else, including his own family
Loyalty to people is a mugs' game. You're just giving them license to use you as a doormat. If you ever face a choice between abandoning a well-thought-out principle at the request of a person, treat the person as though they've been grooming you. Otherwise you'll be left clearing up the mess they caused you to make, looking like a twat because you knew better but did the wrong thing anyway.
I assume that is humour masquerading as cynicism? Or maybe just both? Blind loyalty of the my country/party right or wrong variety (witness HYUFD and swivel-eyed Trump supporters) is extremely dangerous. A world without loyalty at all would be a dysfunctional and dangerous mirror image of HY's stupidity
No, that was entirely in earnest. You should not be loyal to people (or countries or institutions or anything) if they require you to fold on your principles.
If my wife murdered someone, I'd turn her in. If my country asked me to commit war crimes, I'd defect. If my company asked me to look the other way while they circumvented AML laws I'd take the receipts to the police.
Principles first. Don't ignore your moral compass if it's telling you your loyalty is about to lead you astray.
If its saying that its about to lead you astray then absolutely do not put loyalty ahead of principles.
But loyalty can be behind principles but ahead of nothing. Its not all or nothing.
If loyalty costs you nothing and you have two options that are both the same, then loyalty can be a reasonable tie-breaker.
Why has her peerage been blocked, anyway? I mean, whatever one thinks of her she is not obviously less qualified for the role than other recent appointees and arguably more qualified than at least one of them.
Why has her peerage been blocked, anyway? I mean, whatever one thinks of her she is not obviously less qualified for the role than other recent appointees and arguably more qualified than at least one of them.
Because she would not commit to stand down as an MP.
Why would she need to? Peers automatically forfeit their seats in the Commons (exhibit A - Tony Benn).
Although today, Viscount Stansgate would still remain an MP.
Yes, but we're talking about being members of the Lords. You can't take a life peerage and stay in the Commons, surely?
No, that's of course correct. But exhibit A - young Mr Benn - was for an hereditary peerage and since Blair's 'reform' in the late 1990s, these are no longer automatically members of the Lords.
I know that. What I was saying was that becoming a member of the Lords automatically means you leave the commons. Even if you don't want it to (although in that case why accept a peerage)?
Which was true until the removal of automatic hereditary peerages in the 1990s and is why Benn despite refusing to take his seat in the Lords still had his commons seat declared vacant and was not allowed to remain an MP even though he won the by-election with a 13,000 majority.
What was interesting is that the Macmillan Government then introduced legislation to allow peers to renounce their titles within a certain period. This was intended to remedy the injustice to Tony Benn, but it also had the effect of then allowing both Home and Hailsham to do the same and thus become viable contenders for the Tory Leadership in November 1963. A law with unintended consequences....
The irony being that Tony Benn's son and heir is now a hereditary Labour peer. Bob's yer uncle etc. etc.
Home was a true Toff though, the 14th Earl of Home. Benn just had a father who got a hereditary peerage as reward for being a Labour MP and Minister.
Indeed not even the House of Lords has many genuine toffs left, most of them are just appointed Life Peers given most hereditary peers were removed in 1999
Home a true toff? He just had a g-g-g --- ... father who got a hereditary peerage as reward for being on the winning side of a minor civil war.
Comments
And the risk of miscarriages of justice is not small, it's 100% certain that they WILL happen, though there may only be a few of them.
Abstracting away from the specifics of any particular situation, it's interesting to ask whether it is ever worthwhile for a credible scientist to "debate" someone who is obviously wrong and/or argues in bad faith.
I think sometimes it is! (1/n)
https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1670811489798610944
But note the qualifier.
...kudos to scientists with enough self-awareness to recognize that they wouldn't be good in the very particular format of real-time public debate in front of a non-expert audience...
Rhetorical ability, and scientific chops are often not coincidental.
You might also find out, from your poll, that you are wrong. Just one aspect of this drag-shows-meet-kids thing is Drag Queen Story Hour
Wiki suggests these are far from "vanishingly rare"
"DSH events are COMMON in certain parts of the United States, but are rare in more conservative states where they are highly controversial.
DSH is banned in Tennessee, but was blocked by a Federal Judge.[52] Bans are being considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.[52]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour
And remember, DSH is one aspect of a larger phenomenon
I think that, even if it was demonstrated that there was a net utilitarian benefit to the death penalty, that I would still oppose it on the principle that I do not want the State to have the right to kill its citizens.
My guess, looking at the US, is that it does neither, because keeping people on death row for so long is expensive; appeals are constant (and expensive); and there doesn't seem to be any obvious improvement in crime rates between states with and without the death penalty (because life in a US prison without parole is pretty shitty already).
Aus 1.82
Eng 2.56
Draw 16.5
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/cricket/test-matches/england-v-australia-betting-31978934
It's like this. I oppose the use of torture by our government. But if there was a nuclear bomb that was going to go off and kill a million people if we didn't torture a terrorist to get the disarm code, then obviously I'd support the use of torture.
Another popular science book I loved in my teens is a better example of "about as wrong as it is possible to be". That's Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins"!
But what's nice about both books is that they can still excite the reader about the puzzle they seek to solve and they can both play an educational role in illustrating how the scientific method works, in how subsequent evidence disproved their sincerely-argued theses. Science gets things wrong, but corrects itself. These examples are very different from the antivaxxers and the provocateurs, who aren't interested in finding the truth! This mini-thread started with RFK and whoever Elon Musk is fellating this week. You could debate Gould; you can't debate RFK.
Penny Mordaunt sits alone on the government front bench, having explained why she will be supporting the verdict on Boris Johnson. None of her ministerial colleagues have turned out to support her.
https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/1670817755354787841
books must surely be The Kon-Tiki Expedition.
Nevertheless the only thing which matters is China needs to get a lot more serious about food safety. Within a couple of decades they had one SARS epidemic killing millions that was certainly caused by contaminated food and now a second one that probably was. If they don't sort this out - and the rest of us should be banging on about it - we're simply waiting for the next time round. I for one am not happy about it.
China should also tighten up on its lab practices, some of which are unacceptably dangerous.
And by the way, because I don't think anyone has mentioned it. That report from the Sunday Times last week was utter garbage. As someone whose job title includes the word analyst I would likely be fired if I produced something that has so little connection with the known facts , and was demonstrably wrong in several places.
But the one you mention was, also of course, repeatedly wheeled out as justification for torture which was utterly unjustified.
Sunak and the rest should be ashamed.
But more importantly, you're falling foul of equating a pantomime dame reading a children's story (which I suspect will still be pretty rare), with a hypersexualised drag show and a six year old.
Although did you see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2.epdf ?
Not much powerful oratory on display so far. The days when big-hitting parliamentarians could lift a debate onto a higher plane and map out a big picture put into its historical context, with some phrases that might stick in the memory, or even some appropriate humour, appear to be fading away.
Even this Australian female MP from the SNP doesn’t have the knack of her original countryfolk.
Labour leads by 20%, the largest lead for Labour since 19 March.
Westminster VI (18 June):
Labour 46% (+2)
Conservative 26% (-4)
Liberal Democrat 12% (-1)
Reform UK 7% (+1)
Green 6% (+2)
Scottish National Party 3% (–)
Other 1% (–)
Changes +/- 11 June
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1670823762239934465
Will vote in favour; commends the committee. Looks like she is taking on the challenge of rising above the minutiae…
“debate strikes at the heart of the bond of trust between the public and this parliament”
Tobias Elwood intervenes to indicate his support.
May: “with leadership comes responsibility….”
He's also a coward.
Mogg intervenes to suggest Harman was biased.
Harman says she offered to step aside after the tweets came to light, and says the government wanted her to continue.
Harman praises the Tory members of the committee and says they have been subject to intimidation and harassment.
By staying away and leaving this as a fait accompli I guess Sunak and co hope that it draws a bit of a line with regards infighting and so have chosen the political over the moral.
I am sure the former PM will enjoy every moment of it too!
Labour lead seems to be stabilising after a few weeks of gentle post-locals decline.
This is a nice account of work on octopuses over the last decade.
Octopuses use RNA editing to rapidly respond to temperature changes by altering protein function
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-octopuses-rna-rapidly-temperature-protein.html
...In a study appearing in Cell on June 8, Rosenthal and colleagues document an enormous uptick in RNA editing when octopus, squid and cuttlefish, known as coleoid cephalopods, acclimate to cold water. After cooling the octopuses' tanks, the team saw increases in protein-altering activity at more than 13,000 RNA sites in the animals' nervous systems. In two of these cases, they investigated how swapping out a single letter of the RNA molecule's code alters the function of proteins the neurons produce.
Through RNA editing, the cephalopods appear to have found a unique way of tweaking their own physiology, according to Rosenthal, a senior scientist at MBL.
"We're used to thinking all living things are preprogrammed from birth with a certain set of instructions," he says. "The idea the environment can influence that genetic information, as we've shown in cephalopods, is a new concept."
A cell's molecular machinery transcribes the instructions encoded in DNA into RNA, some of which goes on to make protein. Researchers have learned that cells have the capacity to swap one member of the four-letter genetic code, adenosine, for a substitute molecule, inosine, which behaves like guanosine, one of the original four. While the same process occurs in humans and most other animals, it only rarely affects RNA that's bound to produce protein.
In 2015, Rosenthal and his colleagues showed that squid employ this kind of protein-altering RNA editing (called A-to-I) on a massive scale, and later showed the same in octopus.
"A big question for us was, 'What are they using it for?'" Rosenthal says...
NEW: Former prime minister Theresa May says she will vote for the privileges committee's report.
Meanwhile, the current prime minister won't say what he thinks about it all ...
Fortunately, in the case of BJxMP, neither of those words applies.
Meanwhile- has someone just said "that's a mic drop, Rees Mogg"?
But Singapore is an extremely poor proxy for most of the rest of the world's societies, as I'm sure you're aware.
now
@HarrietHarman just revealed to @Jacob_Rees_Mogg she had offered to step aside if Govt felt she was biased against Johnson. Govt refused her offer.
"That's a mic drop, Rees-Mogg!" one Labour MP shouts
@RobDotHutton
12s
Minor bombshell moment as "Sir" Jacob Rees-Mogg asks Harriet Harman why she didn't quit over perceived bias revealed in Tweets. She reveals she consulted the govt and offered to resign if they didn't have confidence. The govt, she says, told her to carry on.
There's a wonderful bit in Lomberg's The Skeptical Environmentalist where he compares polling for:
(a) Has the pollution and the general environment worsened or improved in your local area
and
(b) What is your perceptiomn about the direction of the enviornment worldwide
Most people - almost irrespective of where they lived - felt that their local environment had improved. Those same people also all felt that globally things are getting worse.
You see a similar thing with crime. If you look at trends in "have you personally been the victim of crime" and "do you think crime rates are getting better or worse", you see the two are completely uncorrelated. Crime rates can be worsening, with no perception that they're getting worse.
The same is true for many epidemics (dog bites man!), etc. We think frequency in the real world is highly correlated with headlines, when it is not.
From one Tory MP today on whether the party can finally move on after the Boris vote this eve: "No. There's too much trauma. And he'll still burn us to the ground if he thinks he needs to. He has more planned - it isn't over in his mind."
We are very different conservatives and I am truly disappointed that Sunak looks like ducking the vote which is just wrong
It takes three outstanding women, Penny Mordaunt, Theresa May, and Harriet Harman to stand up in parliament for honesty, integrity and decency and you and the others trying to excuse Johnson should be ashamed and be marginalised
Says those seeking to challenge the process should have spoken up much earlier.
Current evidence suggests they'll surprise us with someone even more unsuitable than any this Century.
But Lomborg was being disingenuous (of course). His whole schtick is that we should focus on local environment rather than trying
to stop global warming. The very thing that makes climate change such a dangerous problem is the fact it creeps up on us all, manifesting in multiple often hard to attribute natural disasters that are not evenly spaced around the map.
Compares (briefly) Johnson to Trump
Condemns “systematic attempt to undermine the work of the committee”
Mrs Lovejoy's "won't someone think of the children" are an amusing caricature 30 years ago, its remarkable to see people here resorting to it today.
My daughter loves to "twerk", she started doing that after she started going to school and picked that up from her friends at school.
Pretty sure that's inspired more by Miley Cyrus etc than 'drag show story time'.
now
Andrea Leadsom becomes the latest senior Tory to mount a strong defence of the privileges committee and say she will vote for its report tonight.
The longer this debate goes on, the worse Rishi Sunak's decision to dodge the vote looks ...
LAB: 46% (+2)
CON: 26% (-4)
LDM: 12% (-1)
REF: 7% (+1)
GRN: 6% (+2)
SNP: 3% (=)
Via @RedfieldWilton, On 18 June,
Changes w/ 11 June.
BREAKING: Met Police chief suggests MORE Tory Partygate fines likely after new Mirror video
Some things are not worth determining by cost-benefit ratios, and the principle that the state should not kill people who are in custody is one I would not waver on even if there were benefits from letting the state do so.
A decent, reasonably powerful speech, criticising Johnson for his behaviour both before and since. Up there with Theresa May for person of the match, so far.
It takes courage to defy the moral cowardice and blindness of colleagues. Penny Mordaunt deserves a lot credit.
Blames the staff for the parties
Also, he's more than a bit complicit. He was in Downing Street all the time. It's the old Watergate questions- what did he know (my guess, more than he has let on) and when did he know it (ages ago).
SCONS - 20%
SLAB - 42%
SNP - 28%
PS when I next see your wife I will advise her to not share too many secrets with you.
The day he was elected...
But loyalty can be behind principles but ahead of nothing. Its not all or nothing.
If loyalty costs you nothing and you have two options that are both the same, then loyalty can be a reasonable tie-breaker.
That should be the accepted form, now.
The man is not fit to run a bath. Like his patron, he is simply a blight on the country.
Tory MP Lia Nici humiliating herself in defence of Johnson to such a degree that it’s bordering on kink.